Tag Archives: my writing

The Lurking Adjectives of Doom

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Put up your hand if you like adjectives. Good.

Now put up your pale, twisted claw of a hand with its squamous, flaking skin and flesh beneath which seems eldritch, almost fungoid, like some blasphemous mockery of humanity, if you really like adjectives.

Now we’re cooking.

Science fiction literature, one of my early loves, used to be plastered with things which were impregnable, unstoppable, invincible and impenetrable. The adjective ruled. Then, with equal frequency these things were pregnated, stopped, vinced and penetrated to satisfy the plot. Most SF idiots like me remember the joys of E E Doc Smith. Boy, did that man love his work.

Horror fiction, on the other hand, has always fallen back on the good ole’ indescribable.

There are two sound reasons for this. The first is that the author genuinely wants to convey something which has an impact beyond normal sensory perception, or is beyond rational description. The very best authors use subtlety, nuance and the effect on the characters to give you what you need.

And sometimes it is best not to describe. Graphic portrayal can be a risk. It reminds me of the two versions of the film Cat People. In the original 1942 version (unless my memory is shot), the menace came from shadows and suggestion. It was unsettling. The 1982 version showed what was happening quite openly and lost out in the process. But it did have a David Bowie theme song, so you takes your chances…

The second good reason for taking the indescribable route is that the author can’t think of a physical manifestation scary enough, and if they actually describe it, the readers will go “Meh! and throw the story away. I think that’s a great way out. Throw in some hints, write the rest of the story and hope that the readers can imagine things better than you can write. Why should writers do all the work?

There is a third reason, but it’s unkind to mention it. So I will. There are authors who can’t use adjectives (or similes) very well, and think that they have found an escape clause.

The creature was so big, no, enormous, well, really large, like a, what’s the word, you know, those bloody great fish, or maybe an eel but like those congers, not the jellied ones, and it had tendrils as large as, oh bugger…

The creature was indescribable.

My particular bugbear is where something supposedly can’t be put into words and then, in the next paragraph (or fifteen), everything is depicted in graphic detail anyway.

Under the guttering light of our one remaining torch, we finally managed to break open the tomb. I slid the stone lid to one side, my arms aching, and there, inside, we saw the indescribable horror that had once been St John Arthur Masters…

“Oh, wait a minute.” said Sandra, squinting. “I’ll tell you what we’ve got here. It’s a ratty old man with half his skin falling off, wearing a shroud which badly needs a wash. He’s deliquescing a bit, which is icky, and his nails need clipping. I think we should set fire to him and go for a pint.” Sandra’s First Pony by J Linseed Grant

On the other hand, I actually enjoy those stories which astonish by their use of language. By which I mean the ones where an earthquake has released a slumbering thesaurus. There are so many lurid adjectives that you have no idea what the central monster/spectre/alien looks like. It has been stamped to death by the thesaurus, which raises its head at the end and roars in triumph. I love a good B-movie.

I read a fantasy short story (no names) in bed last night, on my bargain-basement tablet. And then I read it out to my partner, and to the dogs. We laughed and wept; we shuddered. The adjective count was so high that we genuinely could not understand what had happened, even on a second reading. There wasn’t any space left for nouns and verbs.

H P Lovecraft, one of my favourite authors, was not exactly immune to the curse of the adjective. Which is to say, he used too many of them. Indescribable, antiquarian and shunned spring to mind. In fact, I had to check with The Arkham Archivist. Apparently hideous is the clear winner, with 260 uses in his complete works.

Dunwich_HorrorA subtle film interpretation of Lovecraft’s writing

Out of curiosity I picked up Lovecraft and Derleth’s The Lurker at the Threshold, which was in a pile by my desk, and looked up some descriptions of monster situations. Adjectives formed 20 – 25% of such passages. And I think you’ll agree that such an exercise demonstrates quite clearly that… I don’t have a life.

Fortunately Lovecraft’s ideas, and the impressions he conveys, far outweigh most quibbles about his writing style. He sought to portray events and beings beyond human comprehension, always a fun way to spend an evening. He also had some awareness of his own approach, as demonstrated in this passage from The Dunwich Horror:

It would be trite and not wholly accurate to say that no human pen could describe it, but one may properly say that it could not be vividly visualized by anyone whose ideas of aspect and contour are too closely bound up with the common life-forms of this planet and of the three known dimensions.

He gets points for that. And I am quite keen on “teratologically fabulous”, also from Lovecraft’s The Dunwich Horror. You don’t come across combinations like that every day.

Don’t get me wrong. I make my own mistakes when writing. My particular weakness has always been for metaphors, where people have granite faces and spider hands, that sort of thing. It works really well for a golem infested with arachnids, but it can be a tad overused. Mea culpa.

In conclusion, because this entry is already too long, I can only hope that I’ve used the word “indescribable” so much that you can’t stand to hear it or come across it any more. In which case, my work is done.

In an unnameable, tenebrous and decadent sort of way, of course.

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Vodun Child

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My dear readers will already know that, as a writer in these harsh and competitive times, I have a number of ethical rules which guide my literary career:

  • Hide or lie about my sources, especially if I’ve stolen heavily from them,
  • Keep my ideas to myself until the money’s in, and
  • Never point out that all my plots have been better handled by someone else.

These rules have been invaluable to me, and account for why I’m a penniless agoraphobic who relies on discount artisan ale to get him through even the shortest blog entries. Note the artisan bit, though. I have very high standards of moral and physical bankruptcy.

As a lover of the weird and wild, on the other hand, I like sharing everything and to hell with it. So I’m letting the longdogs loose. Instead, I want to mention two authors you may not yet have come across (or across whom you may not yet have come, if you prefer), Henry S Whitehead and E G Swain. The first I discovered only a couple of years ago, but my little Bone to His Bone collection by Swain has been a prized possession for over twenty years.

I would have described both their recurring protagonists as occult or psychic investigators in their own ways. Sadly, one of them, Swain’s Mr Batchel, has already been kicked out of the club by the writer Tim Prasil, who produced the excellent A Chronological Bibliography of Early Occult Detectives (you don’t come across that phrase very often) on his website. Do look him up, and check out his stories, because I always get the hyperlinks wrong.

So this blog entry will introduce the argument for Henry S Whitehead’s occult investigator, Gerald Canevin, a man of leisure living in the Virgin Islands in the first quarter of last century.

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Just for the trivia-lovers, Whitehead (1882–1932) was a minister of the American Episcopal Church and a friend of H P Lovercraft. He had, at times, church responsibilities in the Virgin Islands, and obviously picked up a lot of local lore. His stories are, for the most part, set in the Caribbean, and a large number include Gerald Canevin’s exposure to curses, entities and events which stem from West African beliefs:

“At last it came, the clue; in a childish, piping treble; the clear-cut word, Jumbee. I had it now. The screaming woman believed, and the crowd about her believed, that some evil witchery was afoot. Some enemy had enlisted the services of the dreaded witch-doctor – the papaloi…”
(Black Terror)

Jumbees are usually malevolent, possessing spirits, and papaloi is one name for a male voodoo priest. As opposed to the mamaloi. Don’t make me explain it. Whitehead drew heavily on the fact that before a chunk of the Virgin Islands was bought by the US, it was actually the Danish West Indies, with a history of plantations, slavery and mixed race populations, creole etc. I have to confess that I didn’t even know that there was a Danish West Indies, so that was a discovery in itself.

The argument which others will raise is that Canevin isn’t enough of an investigator. He does get involved and he does seek out answers, but an awful lot of scary things happen whether or not he does anything. Still, an interesting read. My caveat to interested parties is that very occasionally Whitehead seems to become obsessed with lost Atlantis and ancient Mayan races living under the earth. These (thankfully) few excursions don’t work half as well as some of his creepy, atmospheric stories of the West Indies people and their beliefs.

I was going to end there, but thinking about voodoo, related systems of belief and their African sources reminded me of an even more tenuous claim. Sanders of the River. Edgar Wallace was, I guess, a man of his time *cough*. His Sanders stories can be very dubious, but every so often they’re leavened with a peculiar respect for African people and spiritual systems. And I can now remember at least three which involved ghosts/psychic events which he could not disprove.

Sanders, Occult Colonial Administrator – a new series coming soon.

Next time, in Part Two – Nice People: Mr Batchel and a bit of M R James. Maybe.

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Good News from the Spiritualist Telegraph

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You do not talk of him. You try not to think or dream of him. You turn your face from that column in the morning edition of The Times, and forget the body found last night in St James’ Park. But you know that he was there, and your appetite for those devilled kidneys has gone.

There are things that you have done, people who you have crossed… You push your breakfast plate away and ring for the maid. It is time to visit your aunt, far away to the north in Cumbria. A sudden whim, of course, no particular reason.

London is not as it was last week. Mr Dry is in town.

 

This is an unashamed entry about my psychic detective stories, because I’m pleased to say that The Intrusion, a short story featuring Edwin Dry, is now available to download.

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It’s free, and in a number of formats, but I think the Kindle .mobi layout looks best. If you fancy a read, go to:

https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/564814

A substantial number of my stories and novels are part of Tales of the Last Edwardian. They tend to be complete in themselves, but are linked by a series of characters. About which, more later.

The series currently includes two draft novels (one of which was finished, but I lost the middle section when moving house!), and a number of short stories. Some of the latter are being published in ebook form as I work my way through the piles of paper around my computer, and some are awaiting US decisions. Yes, I did say paper. I started writing on an electric typewriter, for goodness sake. And my early Amstrad PCW green-screen files are mostly lost or corrupt. The lovely days of Locoscript, when a megabyte of memory would have been the size of a fridge…

Almost all of the tales include aspects of spiritualism, the occult or other psychic phenomena, especially at their late Victorian and Edwardian height. They reflect the work of the early psychic detectives, and thus cross into crime fiction in the process. A world of gas-light and lobotomies, electric pentacles and the garotte.

The timeline runs from around the Second Boer War (1899 – 1902), through the Edwardian age and into the horrors of the Great War and its aftermath. It continues in and after World War Two, until it reaches the present day. The phrase The Last Edwardian will explain itself in the later stories.

They are, discounting any whimsical touches I might use in writing them, fairly dark tales of murder, possession, fanaticism, abuse and suchlike. More blood than ectoplasm, let’s put it that way.

Here are a few of the characters which crop up more than once:

Henry Dodgson. One of the four regulars who took dinner with Thomas Carnacki, the Ghost Finder, at Cheyne Walk. A veteran of the Transvaal and certain episodes in South Africa that he would like to forget. After Carnacki’s death, reluctantly drawn into the field of the psychic investigator.

Abigail Jessop. Niece of one of the other chaps who visited Cheyne Walk. Strong-minded and sensitive to many forms of psychic disturbance, human or otherwise. Far more gifted, and better read, than Dodgson, but not as good a shot. A progressive and occasionally difficult woman (according to some of the men she meets, of course).

Dr Alice Urquhart. Resident alienist at High Helmsley Asylum. Trained in Europe where women had more opportunities in the field, familiar with Freud and others, now practising in Great Britain.

Mr Dry. A small, inoffensive figure with pale eyes and a waist-size slightly too large for his liking. If he has a background of note, or any training, no-one knows. He kills people. He has little interest in psychic matters, and even less interest in the people he kills. Everyone should have a trade.

Catherine Weatherley. A powerful and experienced Yorkshire spiritualist, quite capable of conning people by telling them what they want to hear. Also quite capable of identifying major disturbances of the soul.

Captain Redvers Blake. An officer in Military Intelligence, a minor sensitive. Involved in identifying agents of the Kaiser, Bolsheviks, Anarchists and Fenians – anyone who might compromise Britain’s military security. And deciding on their disposal, if required. Special Branch, freedom, or the noose.

For those of a geographical disposition, the stories are set in London, Yorkshire and various other nooks and crannies around Great Britain. My use of the Yorkshire setting is, surprisingly, not to do with it being the land of my birth. It’s because Keighley in West Yorkshire was where Britain’s first spiritualist newspaper was started – The Yorkshire Spiritualist Telegraph.

So, if you like that sort of thing, try reading The Intrusion, and if you want more, sign up to greydogtales.com with your email address to be notified when the next story is available. All comments gratefully received.

That should be enough for now. Or even too much. Ah, that far-off Edwardian world where you could send a postcard and receive the reply in the same day. Who needed email?

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